Microsoft has long held a skeptical view of open source, but the Redmond-based software company is trying to change some of those attitudes with the establishment of officelabs. officelabs is a new internal start-up that is attempting to use some of the methodologies of open-source software development to invigorate the company and generate excitement about new Microsoft products. Specifically, the people behind officelabs want to adopt the 'release early, release often' approach that has worked well for open-source projects such as Linux and Firefox.